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The main purpose of the Theoretical Course of English Grammar is to introduce the student to various linguistic problems connected with grammatical structures and to the modern methods applied in dealing with them. The purpose of the course is to present a systematic study of the grammatical structure of Modern English.
Grammar is divided into 2 parts: morphology and syntax. Morphologyis the part of grammar which deals with the parts of speech and forms of words. Syntaxis the part of grammar which treats of (deals with) phrases and sentences.
It is a very common statement that Modern English is an analytical language, as distinct from Modern Russian, which is synthetical. Occasionally this statement is slightly modified, to the effect that English is mainlyanalytical, and Russian is mainly synthetical. • The chief features characterizing an analytical language are these: • comparatively few grammatical inflections (case inflections in nouns, adjectives and pronouns, and personal inflections in verbs.) • a sparing use of sound alternations to denote grammatical forms. • a wide use of prepositions to denote relations between objects and to connect words in the sentence. • prominent use of word order to denote grammatical relations: a more or less fixed word order.
One of the main notions of grammar is the word. There exist many definitions of the term “word” and none of them is generally accepted. • Linguists point out as most characteristic features of words • their isolability a word may become a sentence: Boys! Certainly.; • their uninterruptibility a word is not easily interrupted by a parenthetical expression as a sequence of words may be; • a certain looseness in reference to the place in a sequence (Away he ran. He ran away. Away ran he.) This is reflected in writing where the graphic form of almost every word is separated by intervals from its neighbours.
One of the central notions of grammatical theory, without which nо serious attempt at grammatical study саn bе madе, is the morpheme. Morphemes maу be briefly defined as the smallest meaningful units into which а word form may be divided.
There also exist allomorphsоf the morpheme: the change of stиdeпt to stиdeпtsis parallel to the change оf ох to охеn and goose to geese. That is, the meaning and function оf the -еn in охеn is the same as the meaning and function оf the -s in stиdeпts. Оn this account the -s and the -еn and the change of the root vowelare said to represent the same morpheme.
Types of word-form derivationfall under two main headings, those limited to changes in the body of the word, without having recourse to auxiliary words (synthetic types), those implying the use of auxiliary words (analytical types). Besides, there are a few special cases of different forms of a word being derived from altogether different stems.
Synthetic Types The number of morphemes used for deriving word-forms in Modern English is very small. They may be enumerated in a very short space: -s (-es), -en,-ren, -’s, -er, –est, -s (-es), -d (-ed), -d (ed), -n (-en), -ing. (11/12) Most of these endings are monosemantic, in the sense that they denote only one grammatical category and not two or three (or more) at a time, as is the case in synthetic languages. This is certainly not the case with the -s (-es) of the third person singular. It expresses at least three grammatical categories: person (third), number (singular), and mood (indicative). In certain verbs it also expresses the category of tense: thus, in the form puts only the -s shows that it is a present-tense form.
Analytical Types These consist in using a word devoid of any lexical meaning of its own to express some grammatical category of another word: has invited, is invited, is inviting, does not invite. The lexical meaning of the formation resides in the participle or infinitive following the verb have, be or do. Some doubt has been expressed about the formations shall invite and will invite. There is a view that shall and will have a lexical meaning.
The existence of such forms in adjectives and adverbs is not universally recognized. The question whether such formations as more vivid, the most vivid, or, again, more vividly and most vividly are or are not analytical forms of degrees of comparison of vivid and vividly, is controversial. If these formations are recognized as analytical forms of degrees of comparison, the words more and most have to be numbered among the analytical means of morphology.
Suppletive Formations Besides the synthetical and analytical means of building word forms in Modern English, there is yet another way which stands quite apart and is found in a very limited number of cases only. By a suppletive formation we mean building a form of a word from an altogether different stem. Go - went; I - me, good - better, etc. In the morphological system of Modern English suppletive formations are a very insignificant element, but they concern a few very widely used words among adjectives, pronouns, and verbs.
